Alma (4 page)

“Yes, Miss Lily,” she said, swallowing hard.

Miss Lily’s mouth became a horizontal line, and her lips drew back slightly to reveal greyish
teeth. She stared into Alma’s face, as if memorizing it. “Well, that’s a good sign. A good sign. Do you know what ‘Alma’ signifies?”

“Um, not really.”

“What does ‘not really’ mean?” the old woman demanded, her thick eyebrows slanting toward the bridge of her nose. “Do you know or don’t you?”

“I d-don’t,” Alma stuttered.

The almost-smile, like a fox baring its teeth, returned to Miss Lily’s stern features. “Alma means, in Latin, one who nurtures, and in Arabic, learned.”

Alma swallowed again. What was expected of her? “Oh,” she said.

“Let us hope you can live up to such a promising appellation,” Miss Lily said. “Now, my daughter tells me that you have an excellent hand and you are prepared to work for me.”

“Yes, Miss Lily,” Alma said, not at all sure what an excellent hand was, but certain she would rather not set foot in this room—or this house—again.

“Well, then, we shall try you out, and if you prove satisfactory, you may consider yourself engaged.”

The wingback creaked as the old woman sat back, holding the walking stick across her knees as if ready to strike someone with it.

“Thank you, Miss Lily,” Alma murmured as she felt Miss Olivia’s hands on her shoulders, turning her and guiding her out of the room.

Miss Olivia shut the door behind them, and took Alma back to the sitting room.

“Now, Alma, I shall explain your duties,” she said. “Sit down here, dear.”

Miss Olivia drew the chair away from a mahogany writing desk that seemed to totter on its slender, curved legs. A row of pigeonholes held envelopes and writing paper. On the surface were a green blotter with leather corners, a brass lamp with a pull-chain and a crystal writing stand with two pen-holders, an inkwell with a brass lid and a depression in which paper clips lay beside gleaming brass-coloured pointed objects Alma didn’t recognize.

“Now, Alma,” Miss Olivia began, pulling a chair to the desk beside Alma. “This will be your workplace. As you see, your materials are all present: the writing paper”—she took from one of the pigeonholes a sheet of thick, creamy paper with a watermark that depicted a seahorse—“the envelopes”—Miss Olivia pointed
to another pigeonhole—“and your pen and ink. When you arrive to work, you’ll find a folder here on the desk. In it will be letters dictated to me by my mother. I take down her words in shorthand, then type them out for you. You simply copy the letter in longhand, address the envelope and clip them together with a paper clip. Then place them in the second folder. All right?”

“Yes,” said Alma. No, she didn’t say. She planned not to come here again, to this dreary, overheated house, this strange woman and the even stranger old woman sitting like an ogre in the back room.

“Now, there is only one thing you might find challenging at first,” Miss Olivia went on, “and that is the pen my mother requires you to use.” She removed one of the pens from its holder. Alma saw right away that it was unusual. It had no point, for one thing. It was longer than a pencil and made of wood—black, Alma reflected, like almost everything else in this house. One end was barrel-shaped; the other tapered to a sharp point like a rat’s tail.

Miss Olivia took one of the brass objects from the trough in the crystal writing stand and fitted it into the circular slit in the barrel end of
the pen. The brass things, she explained, were pen nibs. She flipped open the hinged lid of the inkwell and dipped the nib into the ebony ink. She slid the nib over the edge of the inkwell to remove excess ink.

“Would you like to try it?” she asked, handing the pen to Alma.

Alma took the pen in her hand and positioned the writing paper on the blotter at the proper angle, just as Miss McAllister had taught her. The paper’s texture was heavy and smooth.

“What should I write?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Miss Olivia replied, getting up from her chair.

Alma wrote her name. Then her mother’s name, “Clara.” Then her favourite colour, “yellow,” and her most precious place, “the old harbour.” As her hand moved, she watched the jet-coloured ink flow smoothly from the bright nib to the glossy surface of the paper. When the pen ran dry, in the middle of “fireweed,” Alma’s choice of wildflower—even though it wasn’t, strictly speaking, according to Miss McAllister, a flower—Alma dipped the nib in the inkwell and rubbed it against the glass wall of the well just as Miss Olivia had done. She completed “fireweed” and put the pen into the holder.

“Clear the nib before you put it away,” Miss Olivia said from the couch, where she had been sitting and watching Alma. “There are tissues in the drawer.”

Alma pulled open the wide desk drawer, where she found a flat box of tissues among more stacks of writing paper and envelopes. She cleaned the nib and placed the pen in the holder. Then she pushed back her chair and stood up.

“Well, then,” Miss Olivia said. “We’ll see you again next Saturday morning.”

Oh, no, you won’t, Alma didn’t say.

Alma dawdled on her way home, and by the time she reached the alley behind the Liffey Pub it had begun to rain. She ran the last of the way and used her key to open the door.

She found her mother in her bedroom, sitting before a makeshift dressing table—a board resting on two upended wooden boxes, with a mirror above. She was brushing her hair, humming to herself. Alma sat on the edge of the bed and watched.

Clara wore no makeup, just lipstick. Her chestnut hair was thick and lustrous, and she was proud of it. She kept it long—to her shoulder
blades—but wore it up under an ugly white net when she was working in the Liffey. It was a rule.

“How did your interview go?” Clara asked.

“I don’t like them.”

“Tell me.”

“Olivia Chenoweth smells like dried flowers and she has crooked teeth. And her mother, who I’m supposed to call Miss Lily, is right scowly. She reminds me of Miss Havisham.”

“Who?”

“Miss Havisham, in
Great Expectations
. She’s skinny and ugly and she looks like she just got up out of a coffin.”

Clara laughed and put down her brush. “Alma, that’s not nice. What’s the job?”

“Copying out letters with an old-fashioned pen.”

“No more than that?”

“I have to do the envelopes, too. But I don’t want to go back.”

“Well, Alma, I don’t want to go upstairs to that hot kitchen, either. But we need the money. So I want you to take the job. Try it out for a few weeks, at least.”

“Then can I quit?”

Clara tucked her hair under the net. “We’ll see,” she said.

O
n Saturday morning, Alma ate a breakfast of tea with toast and blueberry jam, brushed her teeth, put on her coat and slipped quietly out the back door, locking it behind her.

It was a sunny day and the air was chilly, carrying the heavy scent of seaweed, sand and salt, the sharp tang of autumn leaves. Alma walked quickly down Little Wharf Road. She didn’t want to be late on the first official day of her first official job. Because it faced west, the front of the Chenoweth house, as Alma now thought of it, was in shadow. Since her first visit, the porch railing had been repaired and painted. The dormer stared down on the street like a Cyclops eye. Alma thought of Hansel and
Gretel finding the witch’s house in the forest. She crossed the street and lifted the knocker.

Miss Olivia bade Alma good morning and let her in. Alma returned her greeting, noticing that, under the flower fragrance that seemed to envelope Miss Olivia like a cloud, was the faint whiff of perspiration.

The cardboard cartons had been cleared away from the hallway. The odour of fried bacon and coffee hung in the air, and Alma could see the breakfast dishes on the kitchen table. Miss Olivia showed Alma into the sitting room. Just as she had promised, there was a folder on the desk to the left of the green blotter and another folder to the right.

“Everything is ready, Alma,” Miss Olivia said. “Call out if you need me. I’ll just be in the kitchen.”

“Yes, Miss Olivia.”

Alma seated herself and opened the left file folder. Briefly, she savoured a wicked thought: if she made a poor job of copying this morning, Miss Lily might fire her, and Alma wouldn’t have to return to this spooky house anymore. The folder contained three sheets of paper, each with typing on it. She took a leaf of the creamy writing paper from the pigeonhole and placed it
on top of a lined page, picked up the pen, lifted the brass lid of the inkwell, dipped the pen nib into the black liquid and began to copy.

When she had finished the body of the letter, Alma wrote “Sincerely,” followed by a comma, and left space for Miss Lily’s name. She took an envelope from the pigeonhole and wrote out the address, a law firm in Rockport, Massachusetts. Then she put down the pen. She got up from the desk and stepped into the hall.

“Miss Olivia,” she called out.

Olivia Chenoweth looked up from the kitchen table, which she was wiping down with a large rag.

“Um,” Alma began.

“Yes, dear?”

“You didn’t tell me the return address,” Alma said. “To put on the envelope.”

“You needn’t include it,” she said, rather abruptly.

“Oh,” Alma replied, frowning. That’s strange, she thought. At school we learned always to include the return address. It’s a rule.

She went back to the desk. The second letter was to someone named Madeleine.

The third was also short. It was addressed to a library in a place called Cambridge.

There were two more letters. It was past ten when Alma slipped the last sheet into the folder to the right. She carefully cleaned the brass nib
and placed the pen in its holder. Pushing back her chair, she got up just as Miss Olivia entered the room.

“Quite finished, Alma?”

“Yes, Miss Olivia.”

“Excellent. Then you’ll be on your way. See you next time.”

When Alma got home, it was almost noon, and her mother was sitting at the kitchen table in slippers and bathrobe, a cup of tea before her and an open book propped against the teapot.

On the floor by the icebox was a large cloth bag. The week’s laundry. Later, they would haul it to the old house by the park on Springbank Road, where Mrs. Squires took in laundry from the Liffey Pub and several restaurants. She kept three electric washing machines in her cellar, and on Saturday afternoons she rented one of them to Clara for a couple of hours.

Clara would grocery shop while Alma sat under the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, reading, accompanied by the
slosh-slosh
of the washer. When the wind-up timer on the shelf gave off its piercing ring, she would run the
clothes through the wringer, cranking the handle with both hands as the clothes slipped into the rinse tub.

Clara put down her book. “There’s a drop of tea left.”

“No, thanks, Mom.”

“Well, sit down anyway and tell me all about this new family in the Stewart house.”

“It’s the Chenoweth house now,” Alma said with authority.

“Is it, indeed, then? So what about the occupants of the Chenoweth house?”

Her mother loved gossip. Whatever she picked up from Alma would be passed on over drinks and dinner orders and tubs of dirty dishes in the kitchen of the Liffey Pub. Dutifully, Alma told all she knew.

“So you didn’t see the old one today? The Miss Havisham woman?”

“Miss Lily. No. And Olivia Chenoweth smells. And she has a space between her two front teeth.”

“So you’ve said. And what about these letters?”

Alma sat up straight in her chair. “Mom, I had to swear not to talk about them. They’re private. Miss Olivia said I should think of
myself as a pen that writes them but doesn’t understand. Or something like that.”

Clara stirred her cold tea. “I guess you’re right. You wouldn’t be much of a secretary if you blabbed, would you? Well, let’s get dressed and get some work done.”

“I am dressed,” Alma said.

“So you are. Then while I don my finest apparel, you can do up the dishes.”

O
ne Monday after school Alma headed for the library, carrying her school bag. The trees around the square had turned blazing red and orange, and a chilly rain pattered on the broad leaves, knocking some of them to the soggy grass.

To Alma, the large double door of panelled oak, shiny with varnish, adorned with long tubular brass handles darkened by many hands, was like the portal to a castle. She stepped inside and shook the rain from her coat before hanging it alongside six or seven others on the rack by the door, eyes averted from the stairs to the darkened basement, where, according to Robbie Thornton, the ghost of a dead janitor lurked.

“Of course he’s dead,” Alma had sneered when Robbie told her the story of how the janitor had hanged himself from the steam pipe. “He couldn’t be a ghost otherwise, could he?”

Robbie seemed to think every building in Charlotte’s Bight harboured a haunt somewhere in its dark corners. Alma was certain—almost—that he had made up the tale about the janitor. He told the stories just to get attention, she thought. Still, she kept her eyes fixed ahead as she mounted the three steps to the reading room and circulation desk.

There were a few people in the reading room, standing among the stacks or perusing newspapers at one of the broad tables in the centre. Alma caught sight of Louise Arsenault in the fiction section, with Polly Switzer and Samantha Keith, two of her most loyal followers. Alma pointedly ignored them and listened to the quiet, punctuated by the
click, click
of the old clock, with its hexagonal face and Gothic numerals, on the wall above the circulation desk. At the far end of the room, she saw her mother pushing a book cart among the stacks, pausing to replace a book, then moving on. When Clara looked up, Alma waved.